


Dead Man Walking

by NoelleAngelFyre



Series: Fire and Gunpowder [9]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014), The Flash - All Media Types
Genre: Death by Gas Chamber, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Gen, Non-Graphic Descriptions of Murder/Violence, Non-Graphic Sexual Content, Particle Accelerator (explosion), Separated from Family, back from the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 18:25:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6162580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoelleAngelFyre/pseuds/NoelleAngelFyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Second chances in life are often hard to come by.  Especially when you're supposed to be dead, and there's something very, very wrong with your body.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Man Walking

**Author's Note:**

> The particle accelerator explodes, and new dilemmas are set into motion.

“ _Paradise_?”

“I must say,” she shrugs, tapping fingers lightly on the plastic counter and trying to not think about what created the strangely-colored stain off to the left side, “contrary to its reputation, it actually is a respectable establishment. And they pay me well, plus whatever tips I personally make off the patrons.”

“Tips for what, pray tell?”

“Ye of no faith.” She frowns at him. “What do you take me for? A whore who tosses one man for the next?”

“That one man is currently on the express lane for hydrogen cyanide.” Kyle reminds her, unnecessarily; she’d like to accuse the glass panel between them of distorting things, but there’s no denying reality. He’s thin, he’s tired, and he’s angry. Not at _her_ , never at her, but at life. It’s a distinct darkness that doesn’t go away; a stormy mania clinging to him like an aura. She doesn’t like it, but she understands it. The same fury resides within her; she just likes to think she hides it better.

“Doesn’t matter.” She replies, fingers curling tight around the phone. “Never has. Never will.”

The shadows in his gaze lighten, just a little. “This is the part where I tell you to stop wasting your life on me.” He says, quietly, staring at her intently. She wonders if he’s memorizing her, again, until the next time she passes through the dark, concrete-grey halls of Iron Heights and they reunite in a room of Plexiglas and cold metal chairs.

“And I tell you,” she answers, leaning forward and pressing a palm flat to the heavily-smudged panel; he matches the movement without hesitation, “it’s my life and I’ll waste it however I damn well please.”

***

He can’t help but feel the whole appeals process is more his lawyer’s thing, and he’s just being dragged along for the highly tedious and long-winded ride. Once or twice, he thinks to remind the little man that this just wastes time and money. Nothing is going to change or be overturned. His former employer ensured as much, with detailed testimony and damning evidence that no judge in the country would consider irrelevant. His lawyer reminds him, frequently, that perhaps the death sentence might be commuted to life in prison.

_Such a reprieve_ , he often thinks, while half-listening to the round-faced man rifle through paper after paper, informing him of any updates. Life in prison instead of death in the gas chamber…what, exactly, is the difference? Either way, he will never leave Iron Heights again, except in a pine box. The only question is if he’ll die in a haze of poisonous gas or in a concrete cell. Or, and this one might be the more likely option, die in a fight with someone in general population. He’d just as soon keep his isolated cell on death row; at least here he has peace and quiet.

He remembers Stazia once threatening him, should he die first, that she would drop kick his coffin off the peer, or perhaps garnish his body with chum and deposit him in shark-infested waters. Strange, really, the things one remembers when one has nothing else to do but think.

He asks her if she’ll still do it, now that there isn’t much question of whether or not he’ll die first. Part of him thinks she will, and the rest of him thinks maybe she’ll tell him to shut up and not talk about that, especially when they have such little time together now.

“That threat was in the event of death by reckless stupidity.” Stazia answers; she’s growing her hair out, wearing it straight instead of curled, and there’s a dark red fringe lining the tips. It looks good on her. “You didn’t put yourself here, so it doesn’t apply.”

Legally and technically speaking, yes, he did. But he hears the unsaid: he was careful, he never left evidence, and the police had no leads prior to Araz Darbinyan’s generous offering of anything and everything they could have ever wanted. By that reasoning, she speaks true. He didn’t put himself on death row.

“Have you talked to him?” he asks, already knowing the answer.

“Talked to who?” she answers, coolly lifting one eyebrow, and he wants nothing more than to reach through the glass and kiss her.

_Family is forever_ , the old saying goes. But not for her.

***

Kyle’s lawyer calls late one evening, as her shift is ending and the last few customers are filing out the door. She takes the call outside, for privacy, and then tells him to go ahead. He sounds defeated, exhausted, and she suddenly doesn’t want him to speak. If he doesn’t speak, then it won’t be real. A foolish thought, a little girl’s wild fancy; she knows better.

“ _All appeals are lost._ ” He says, quietly, with the weariness of a man sunk deep in his chair and running one hand over his face, several times. “ _I did what I could. I’m sorry._ ”

_Everyone is sorry_ , she thinks but doesn’t say, as she ends the call. Everyone is so very sorry. It doesn’t make any difference.

She waits for the tears to come. All night, the next day, and the following night, she waits and waits. They don’t come. The media covers what she already knows, declaring it from the rooftops like some great victory for the justice system, and the tears still don’t come. The grief isn’t even there. The overwhelming sadness, the crippling devastation, the bone-deep aching, the complete loss of will and desire to live…it never comes. She waits. Day, after day, after day, she waits. She feels no grief. She feels no sorrow.

She feels rage. The fire, the smoldering blaze, the untamed inferno, she feels. She feels it deep in her bones, in her core, consuming her heart. Rage, anger, fury… _hate_. She feels it. She feels all of it.

***

The last wishes of a dying man are perhaps the only ones truly acknowledged and accommodated. There are always questions and feeble protests when the request changes, of course; it’s to be expected, but still, people listen now that he’s a dead man. 

The guards don’t know what to do with him: he refuses a last meal, bluntly refuses any meeting with a priest, and nearly spits on the concept of receiving last rites. Five hours before he’s due to enter the gas chamber, the warden finally visits him and asks, with contrived concern, what it is he wants. He doesn’t want food, and he doesn’t want peace for his soul. So, what does the Darbinyan Hitman want before going to meet his maker?

The answer is simple, short, and succinct. He tells the warden, in no uncertain terms, he doesn’t care how it happens, what rules are to be broken, and could care less about ethical issues. “Just make it happen.” He says, then turns and settles on his cot. After a couple minutes of silently staring, the warden walks away.

Forty-five minutes pass in heavy silence. He doesn’t have a watch or a clock, but he hears the quiet _tick, tock, tick, tock_ of the wall clock, down the hall, and he counts the seconds himself. He quietly wonders what Araz and the family are doing now. Probably watching the clock themselves, waiting for the midnight hour to come and go. Perhaps tomorrow, Araz will call the coroner’s office for a confirmation of death, and then that will be the end of it.

The cell door opens with a loud _clang!_ He stares determinedly at the wall; if it’s the warden, telling him the request couldn’t be granted and a condemned man’s final wishes will go unfulfilled, he doesn’t want to hear it and he certainly doesn’t want to look the man in the eye while listening to some pathetic excuse. Give him no temptation to add another name to his generous list.

“Walk away.” Stazia’s voice fills the cell, addressing the guard standing nearby, and it’s comparable to a sudden swell of music at some theater production: it breaks the silence abruptly, but so soothing and heartening that one can’t help but delight to hear it. Still, he stays motionless, holds an empty gaze with the wall, and waits. The door falls closed, heavy footsteps echo down the hall, thirty seconds long, and then another door closes. And it’s quiet again.

He hears something drop to the floor half a second before she’s on him, straddling his lap, kissing him slowly, leisurely, blatantly disregarding the time constraints on this stolen moment. She takes her time in everything: kissing his lips, peeling away clothing, relearning his skin, rediscovering his body. It’s a struggle for him to do the same, when he’s half-mad with the need to just touch her. Anywhere. Everywhere. Touch, everything, _now_.

She shakes her head and pulls free of another kiss when he pinches her waist with a bruising grip. “Don’t.” she says. “Don’t hurt me. Not right now.”

This isn’t what he expected. He thought, beyond nearly any doubt, she would be ravenous, on fire, blazing rage redirected to pure driven lust. “I _need_ you.” He whispers, as though it will convey everything.

“And I need you.” She returns, voice equally soft, and then her lips begin a slow path down his neck before any further discussion can be had.

It’s almost disappointing, but then she pushes him down to the mattress, knees fitted to his sides, and he feels the change. It’s not hard and fast, but in the slow paths her hands make along his skin, he feels possession; in the way she refuses to break their shared gaze, he feels those eyes branding him in silent declarations: _Mine. Always mine._

They make good use of their two hours, again and again and again. At some point, he realizes she’s crying, but it doesn’t stop her from clinging to him, grabbing hold as though he’s her lifeline, and perhaps he is. She leaves tiny marks along his sides and shoulder blades, and tear stains across his shoulder and one cheek. She whispers his name like a mantra, over and over and over, and he engrains the sound in his ears where it will never be forgotten. 

He wonders, more than once, if he’ll leave her with a child tonight. He can’t decide if the thought brings him joy or relief, or something less pleasant. He thinks perhaps it’s a mix of both: the thought of a baby, _their_ baby, brings him a strange, albeit detached sort of delight, the kind he feels and it’s very real but ultimately doesn’t matter because he won’t be alive to see it be born. He wonders if his child would be a curse or a blessing for her, if this permanent reminder of him, after the gas chamber has sucked life from his lungs, would revive her or destroy her.

When it’s over, as she’s zipping her jacket closed and not quite meeting his eye, he takes both arms and pulls her to his chest. Her gaze flits from his eyes to his lips and back to his eyes, in a rapid, fluid movement. She’s barely breathing. She looks afraid. She looks lost. Her fingers fist in his shirt, and he can only read her gaze as a promise and a final wish, wrapped into one destructive desire: to die with him. It’s almost Shakespearean, all of this. He sees the irony, even if it’s not amusing.

“I love you.” He says, and watches as the tears slowly begin their descent on her cheeks. “And I don’t regret any of this.”

“Famous last words.” She whispers, without humor. He tastes the salt of her tears when she kisses him again.

***

The explosion is exactly that: a massive eruption of light and noise, peaking at the city center and rippling outward with the ferocity of an atomic detonation. Miles away, on the city outskirts, beyond traffic and human population, she sees the violent burst of pale light and feels the tremor of earth beneath her feet. It isn’t enough to unbalance her, but enough that she feels it in her bones. The questions of what causes such a bizarre event, and who is responsible for it, pass through her mind and fade just as quickly, without any consideration for either. To the fragmented pieces of her sanity, this is the chaos churning within, brought to life. This is her anguish, and the city will feel it with her. That explosion is the visual depiction of her heart, as it finally shatters within her chest.

She drops to her knees, hands fisting atop thighs. The tears fall and die upon the dirt. She barely sees their descent, but she feels the icy sting of their paths along her skin. She watches the last remnants of light wither and dissipate into the darkness. Silence follows. Within the city, there is very possibly noise, lots of noise, but here, on her knees with the unyielding metal of her bike digging deep into skin, it is silent. Quiet. So very quiet.

She throws her head upward, staring at the black emptiness above, and the heavens stare back, pitiless eyes and hollow expression. She screams. She screams until her throat is raw and her lungs have no air left to spare.

***

He can’t breathe. He’s alive, but he can’t breathe.

At least, he thinks he’s alive. He must be, because he can feel the crushing tightness in his lungs, and every nerve in his body is tingling to the point of pain, but how? _How?_

It’s dark, and cold. He feels steel like arctic ice on his bare back, and the backs of his thighs…everywhere. His eyes are open, but there are only shadows to see. It’s cold. It’s dark. And he’s alive. Impossibly, he’s alive.

“Time of death,” a man’s voice speaks from above, muffled somehow, by something, “twelve o’ five a.m.”

_Click._ A pen? A recorder? Three steps away, shoes soles shuffling quietly on the floor, and the man sighs again. “Cross that one off the list, Joe.”

_Joe. Joe West. Detective Joe West._ He remembers that name, that face, that man. The man who arrested him, who sat in the courtroom day after day, week after week.

“One of many,” he hears West’s voice, sounding weary and tired but still relieved, “but we’ll take it.”

He hears the two men discuss something about an explosion, a particle something, and then a frustrated comment about how it—whatever “it” is—never ends, then bid each other good night. The door closes, locks, and it’s quiet again.

He feels how someone being crushed under the weight of a truck must feel: his lungs are curled in on themselves, with a splintering kind of pain that makes him run hands urgently across his chest, trying to determine if there’s something on him, if his ribs have caved in on themselves. Something. Anything. _Nothing._ His body is naked, but intact. There’s nothing wrong with his body…on the outside. Inside, his nerves are electrified, burning white-hot. His blood feels thick and heavy in the veins, and he can’t be sure that his heart is still beating. But his body is alive. Very alive. Too alive. It hurts. He feels sick.

He needs to move.

His limbs were much more compliant when limited to close range, to running shaky hands up and down his chest. Now, when he tries to lift his arms up, feel through shadows for something, anything that will give him bearings, both feel like lead. It takes him nearly five minutes to reach up and find the cold steel panel above him, and to his left, and to his right. It takes another two minutes to find the panel behind his head. There’s got to be a handle. There has to be. There’s got to be a way out of here. He needs to get out. He needs—

—He hits the cold tile floor, hard. He blinks, twice, and looks around. Beside him, a wall of steel doors. Around him, an office with two metal tables and adjacent trays…a coroner’s office. The only place for a dead man to be.

But he’s not dead. He can’t be.

What’s going on? Half a second ago, he was inside one of many drawers, another body stored within cold steel walls. Now, he’s out, sprawled on the floor, naked, cold. And he still can’t breathe. He tries; forces out a sharp breath, anything at all. It burns, and he sees his breath. Except it’s green. 

The gas, the poison, was green too.

It’s not just coming from his mouth. It’s coming from his chest. And his hands. It’s all over him. It’s coming out, from all of him. It _is_ him.

No. _No._

Outside the door, he hears movement. Someone’s out there. Someone who might come in here, and see him, dead man walking. He needs to get out of here. No, first he needs clothes. Then, he needs to get out of here.

There are discarded prison uniforms off to the left, collected in a small pile. He can’t be sure who they belong to, and he can’t take time to care. The first one that fits well enough, he takes. He hears the soft jingle of keys, then the click of a lock, and the quiet creak of a door opening—

—The night wind is cold against his face. The air smells bitter, like the streets, like asphalt, like stale booze. His chest hurts again. His skin is tingling. His limbs throb and he has the urge to vomit up an empty stomach. The buildings are tall, closely connected, and most definitely not the perimeter of Iron Heights. He can’t even see the prison from here.

_Where am I?_

Around him, the street is dark, with only a few dim street lamps lit. He doesn’t immediately recognize this place, this neighborhood, this side of town. The sidewalk is dirty, smeared with dirt and other things of unknown origin, littered with trash; there is a homeless camp just down the alley, a low flame smoldering in a trash can, with three or four persons gathered. None of them look his way. No one else is around.

Or so he thought.

Some ways down, maybe one block, maybe five, he hears voices. The words are inaudible, but the gender of each speaker is distinct: one man, one woman. There is nothing cheerful or pleasant about their conversation, at least not on her end. Her voice, whoever she is, raises with each word even when the man’s doesn’t. She’s angry. She’s very angry. She’s…

_Stazia._ He can’t see her. He can’t hear her words. But he hears her voice. It’s her. He knows it’s her. 

_But how?_

The process of standing and moving forward is done with the same grace as a cripple: he stumbles more than once, as though drunk beyond comprehension, and the world tilts left and right about five times in as many minutes. The nausea couples unpleasantly with the tightness in his chest. He feels ready to explode.

The voices grow louder as he blindly comes closer; the words become more audible, and the speakers’ identities far more recognizable. Yes, that’s Stazia. He’s sure of it. The man...the man is…

Moran. The younger one, not the fathering specimen. The one she was supposed to marry…a month ago? Three months ago? No… _no, a year ago. It’s been a year._ But she’s not marrying him. Moran has no claim to her. _…Why is he here?_

Does it even matter? _No._ Moran is here. Stazia is here. Moran shouldn’t be here. He has no right to her. Never did, never will. _She’s mine._

He wonders, as he stumbles a little closer and Stazia’s words come into sharp clarity, if they share each other’s thoughts. They must, because she’s expressing as much, with cold fury and fire in her eyes, visible even in shadows. Moran has her outmatched in size, but she’s all spitfire rage and subarctic dismissal. She’ll never be taken without a fight.

“I don’t care about your family spats.” Moran says, taking a heavy step forward. “You were a promised consolation prize, and I intend to collect.”

“Like hell.” She spits. Two more steps forward, and she responds with three backward. Moran’s still too close, and now he’s reaching for her… _No. No, no, no. **Stazia…**_

“I’m not giving you a choice, little girl.” Moran reaches out and misses her arm by mere inches. _Too close._ “We’ll do this the easy way, or the hard—”

“ _Leave her alone_.” He distantly registers the movement of his lips, but the voice he hears is a vicious rasp, not quite an animal’s growl, yet still far too gnarled to be human. His hand almost darts up to clutch his throat, to feel for scars or burns, because that’s how he sounds. He sounds like a man who has just inhaled fire and somehow lived to tell the tale.

Both Moran and Stazia turn and find him in the alleyway. Moran blinks, three times, and shakes his head as if it’ll clear his vision. In the shadows, Kyle can see very little of Stazia, and it makes him angry because she’s the one he wants to see. Not Moran. Not this…this _thing_ that almost took her. But that’s what he has to look at, because Moran’s bulk hides her.

“What the hell…?” Moran mutters, blinking again and coming closer. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

Yes, he is. He’s supposed to be dead. But he’s not.

“Walk away.” The words come out, but why? Why would he let this man live? To come back another day, another time?

_“May God have mercy on your soul.”_

He’s beyond mercy. He’s a killer. He’s the Darbinyan hitman. He’s a monster. He’s…

In the cavern of his chest, he feels his lungs suddenly expand and then deflate. His chest hurts, again. He can’t breathe, again. But, in the pale light of dying streetlamps, he sees green wisps swirl upward and dissipate in the cold air. Gas. _The gas._ The gas meant to kill him, erase him from existence, leave him nothing but a bad memory. But it didn’t kill him. It’s inside him.

_I am poison._

_I am death._

Moran saw it. He saw it, and he took two steps back. Words are forming on his lips, as their eyes meet again, but he doesn’t speak. He’s never given the time.

The feeling is…surreal. An out-of-body experience, of sorts, but there’s something very real about it even when it’s not. His body just…dissolves. Skin, bones, muscle, all of it, gone. Dissipated into the cold air around him. And yet, it’s all there. His body. He still has control. He can move the gas as effortlessly as he moves his arms, his legs, his head. It’s all there. It’s all _him_.

When he rushes forward and delves into the dark cavern that is Moran’s gaping mouth, it’s with a detached sense of vicious satisfaction. Does he enjoy redefining “up close and personal” in ensuring this man’s death? Hell no. But Moran is not one of the dozens ordered by Araz into an early grave. There was no satisfaction with them; they were just a job. Go to work, do the work, come home and collect a paycheck. Cold, calm, clinical execution. Moran…Moran is different. And when he feels the heavy mass of flesh drop flat to the ground, absorbs the violent spasm of both lungs as they quickly wither under the assault, and withdraws just in time to feel life expire with a final rattling breath, he feels righteous fury. For a moment, it feels so good.

Then it fades, because he’s on his knees, the cold concrete pressing through thin fabric, and he can’t breathe. At all. Every breath is a violent gasp, tearing at his throat and burning through his lungs. He’s shaking. He feels sick, and he feels dizzy, and…

“Kyle…” Stazia’s voice trembles through the air; she’s standing a short distance away, and coming closer. No. _No, stay away. Don’t…_

“Don’t touch me.” he whispers; the effort alone it takes to speak feels like a final punch. The world spins wildly, and his vision is rapidly narrowing in a haze of black and grey. “Don’t…”

_I don’t want to hurt you._

“ _Kyle_!”

***

Detective West arrives at _Paradise_ the next morning, before business hours, to deliver personal items, the majority of which was previously deemed evidence. Now that the execution has been carried out, successfully completed, and justice has been served, it can be released. Kyle listed her as Next of Kin, the detective explains, while handing over the box. A box. A cardboard box. Everything, all of him, has been reduced to a cardboard box.

The knife and gun are in secured evidence bags. She rips and claws at them until the plastic yields. She places the gun in a velvet lined box, a “Welcome to the Family” gift from Mama, and puts it aside to be taken home tonight. There is a little latch on the front, accessible only by an equally small key. A key this small can easily be stolen, or lost, or misplaced. She finds a little chain and makes a necklace, with the key its pendant.

Mama comes up an hour after Detective West leaves, to the room where Stazia is slowly twirling the knife between her hands, fingers idly caressing its shape. She gives no worthless reassurances about how “there are other men” and how she’ll “find love again”. In the older woman’s comforting silence, Stazia can hear the sound of a sympathetic heart, the kind belonging to a woman who once loved and lost.

She also hears something else. Something she doesn’t want to hear.

“There’s a young man looking for you downstairs.” Mama says, with a frown wrinkling her otherwise-gentle features. “Do I let him in, or do I kick him off the step?”

She has no desire for visitors, but she recognizes the voice when it drifts upstairs, impatiently calling for her. She recognizes it, and the unpleasant swirl of conflicted emotions that’s been attacking her for twenty-four hours is abruptly lifted. In its’ place, the anger is almost enough to make her vomit.

She steps past Mama, without any resistance from the elder, and descends to the lower level with the knife clenched tight in one hand. Raffi is there, looking perfectly put-together, clean-cut, composed, relaxed. His eyes widen at the sight of her, and she knows what he sees: heavy shadows from too many sleepless nights, a red tinge to brown eyes that seems almost permanent from too many tears shed, and skin that’s lost its tanned complexion from more time indoors than out. He takes a step forward, hand outstretched, and she slaps it away.

“Don’t touch me.”

He flinches, just a little, though she can’t tell if it’s the slap or the way her voice sounds hoarse and resembles an animal growl. He recovers, quickly enough, and tells her Araz wants “this game to end”. He says they want her to come home, to the family. He says “enough is enough”. He acts as though this is all a game to her, to him, to everyone. _Just a game…_

Her arm flicks upward, the knife angled directly for his jugular. Raffi flinches and steps back with both hands held in surrender. He mumbles something about “taking it easy” and “don’t do something you’ll regret”. She doesn’t hear much of it, if any. She hears Kyle’s voice, a soft murmur in her ear, low and gentle. In her ear, he’s talking her through basic human anatomy—most of it she already knows, but not necessarily in this context—and directing her hand to wield a knife into someone’s throat, to slit arteries and watch them bleed out like an animal. She imagines Raffi, at her feet, a blood of crimson growing by the second…and then she remembers the carpet. The brand-new, beautiful plush carpet that took Mama forever to find because practically no store carries this particular shade of purple. She can’t stain the carpet.

“The next man who comes here,” she says, lips quivering, jaw clenched, “dies, and he dies slowly. If you don’t leave in the next five seconds, you’ll be the first one.”

***

There’s gently-worn upholstery beneath him, a warm blanket covering him, and the aroma of cinnamon and old spice in the air. As he slowly pries one eye open, the room comes into focus: a modest apartment, warm ivory walls, polished wood floors, and all the essentials in both accommodations and furnishings. He can see a wall across the way, and open space beyond that. The room is dark, but there’s a little side table nearby with a lit lamp offering some illumination.

One hand brushes curiously over the upholstery. Leather. He must be on a couch. And he knows he didn’t get here without help. Stazia always has been terrible at doing what he says. Well, him and everyone else in existence; he shouldn’t take it personally.

Around the corner, he hears keys slide in a lock. The door opens shortly thereafter. Tension pricks lightly at his nerves, but the fight-or-flight instinct has been reduced to a short battle between his mind, urging movement for the sake of self-preservation, and his body, which feels like it’s been hit by a fully-loaded freight train and then backed over, twice. His body wins.

Heels click on the floor only twice, and then the door closes. He hears something scrape quietly over the wood, and then the nearly inaudible pad of bare feet walking closer. He counts five seconds, and then she’s there, slipping free of her jacket and dropping it over the small kitchen table. Casual today—jeans and a sleeveless top—and she looks pissed. Beyond pissed, actually.

Then she looks at him, sees he’s awake, and the anger fades to something softer. She takes two steps forward, and he immediately tenses. “Don’t.”

“I carried your carcass down the alley and up three flights of stairs.” She replies, unmoved, and continues forward until she’s seated at his feet, far side of the couch. “I’m still breathing.”

“You can’t be near me.” He pushes, but it’s just empty words when his attempt to withdraw and press into the nearest corner fails miserably.

“And yet, here I am.”

“Would you take this seriously?” he growls, now a little annoyed at her flippant response. “I—”

“—Turned into a massive cloud of hydrogen cyanide, in the middle of the alley, without warning, without explanation, and killed my former fiancé, right in front of me?” she replies, barely a blink, and his irritation wavers in the face of her deadpan response to something that, when spoken out loud, sounds absolutely ridiculous. “At least, I’m assuming that’s what you were, right? Or have you been in close contact with any other systemic chemical asphyxiates lately?”

Now, he takes a moment to blink and stare at her. She frowns at his obvious bewilderment, then huffs and tosses herself off the couch. “I went to school remember?” she snaps while yanking open the refrigerator door and pulling out a bottle of water; he clearly pinched a nerve. “I happened to be a decent student half the time. Especially in science.”

“Why?”

She smirks, sort of, and rolls her eyes with another sigh. “What other class could I set things on fire or blow up glass vials and call it conducting scientific observation?”

_There_ ’s another piece of the puzzle. His mouth feels rather dry, dehydrated after the last couple days, and he casts a longing look at the bottle in her hand. She catches his gaze and shakes her head. “Not yet. Not until we know how stable your condition is. Hydrogen cyanide mixes with water about as well as it does with heat.”

“I am not going to be your science experiment, Stazia.” He says, determined to put an end to this before it begins. Horrible visuals of her stretching him across a table with needles and scalpels are already coming to mind.

“Guess what?” she says, strolling forward and bending towards him with a disturbing grin on her lips. “You’re supposed to be dead and buried in a pine box. But, you’re not. You’re now a walking time bomb of unstable gas particles, and unless you plan to live the rest of life erupting into a noxious fume of death at random, smile and deal with it. ‘Cause you’re my bitch now, baby.”

…He could just cry.


End file.
